Version Control Blog

Buck Hodges writes about branching, merging and shelving in Team Foundation. Branching and merging are business as usual, with many details specific to Team Foundation. Shelving, as far as I understood, is the implementation of lightweight temporary branches. This may be a good feature for occasional use. Read more at Overview of Branching, Merging, and Shelving (in Team Foundation’s Weblog).

Chris Birmele has written a small but useful essay on branching and merging as one of the aspects of proper Software Configuration Management. He lists the following benefits of good SCM practices:

• it safeguards your intellectual property– the software assets!
• it helps improve communication among team members;
• it provides a way to establish clear responsibilities and accountability;
• it provides traceability and reproducibility;
• it facilitates reusability of software assets;
• it provides consistency, reliability and integrity of software assets;

Chris also briefly describes common branching strategies and provides a short list of branching and merging anti-patterns. Read the “Branching & Merging Primer” article (7 pages, in Microsoft Word format).

One of the hottest links of the moment is the blog post by Moishe Lettvin about how the Windows Vista shutdown menu got to be how it is. What, of course, caught my attention is how the version control is deployed inside Microsoft. Quoting Moishe:

I’d also like to sketch out how actual coding — what there is of it — works on the Windows team. In small programming projects, there’s a central repository of code. Builds are produced, generally daily, from this central repository. Programmers add their changes to this central repository as they go, so the daily build is a pretty good snapshot of the current state of the product. In Windows, this model breaks down simply because there are far too many developers to access one central repository — among other problems, the infrastructure just won’t support it. So Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes. It should be noted too that the only common ancestor that my team, the shell team, and the kernel team shared was the root. So in addition to the above problems with decision-making, each team had no idea what the other team was actually doing until it had been done for weeks.

Read the whole story: Moishe Lettvin “The Windows Shutdown crapfest”.

22 Nov 2006: GIT 1.4.4.1: contains mostly small post-release fixups.

17 Nov 2006, Cogito 0.18.2: a couple of bugfixes and a trivial new feature. (via LWN.net)

linux(at)horizon.com has published the draft document on branching and merging in Git.

I know it took me a while to get used to playing with branches, and I still get nervous when doing something creative. So I’ve been trying to get more comfortable, and wrote the following to document what I’ve learned.

Read it at LWN.net: “Branching and merging with git”

Git Queues (gq) is a series of bash scripts which add a Mercurial queues-like functionality and interface to git. 14 Nov 2006: Git Queues 0.10: The scripts are rather incomplete at the moment, but I’m hoping they’ll get to being very usable very soon. (via LWN.net)

14 Nov 2006: Cogito 0.18.1: few minor new features and random bugfixes to the cogito-0.18 version. Nothing groundshattering. (via LWN.net)

Several Git releases happened in recent weeks. I am catching up with the news. Read more at LWN.net:

• 14 Nov 2006: Git 1.4.4: Quite a lot of changes during the last month;
• 11 Nov 2006: Git 1.4.3.5: […]in the meantime here is primarily to fix git-svn correctness issues;
• 05 Nov 2006: Git 1.4.3.4: three larger fixes, and many minor fixes and documentation updates;
• 20 Oct 2006: Git 1.4.3.1: primarily to work around changes in the recent GNU diff output format. Also it contains irritation fix for “git diff” which now paginates its output by default;
• 18 Oct 2006: Git 1.4.3: many user-visible changes;

qgit is a graphical git repositories viewer built on Qt libraries. 11 Nov 2006: qgit 1.5.3: This is mostly a bug fix release. Several issues has been fixed, also some crash bugs, so an update is strongly suggested. To note is the new possibility to set the font used by patch and file content viewers. (via LWN.net)